Archive for August, 2005

I’m certainly no huge fan of Rudy Guliani, but the contrast between Guliani on 9/11 and Bush this week is pretty striking.

…As Thad points out, Echidne pulls a classic quote. Yes, who could possibly ever imagine that eroding levees that the city of New Orleans had been asking for money to repair for many years could be breached after a Category 4 Hurricane? Jeebus.

As appalling as Jonah Goldberg’s comments about “playing the class card” are, make sure to scroll down for his earlier comments:

I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared.

Yep, putting tens of thousands of poor people, many of them about to become homeless, many of them with severe health problems in a extremely humid building with rapidly failing plumbing and dwindling food supplies–pure comedy gold! But there I go playing the class card again–hell, Jonah had to wait three minutes for a cab yesterday, and who’s to say that wasn’t a million times worse? Then there’s his non-apology apology:

Perhaps Professor Bainbridge — of whom I am a fan — thinks something really awful will befall the denizens of the Superdome and therefore making a joke at their expense is wrong. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status.

He’s as prescient as he is funny! But what’s most disturbing is his assertion that being a “refugee” is just a “victim status” with which one is “sanctified,” as if being homeless is no big deal. This isn’t conservatism in any meaningful sense; this is just reprehensible.

However, I can’t really agree with Ethan’s title for Goldberg, for the reasons stated by Lindsay. Similarly, I don’t think it’s appropriate to call him a “wanker”; wanking, after all, is a source of pleasure, and pleasure is something that is not associated in any way with Goldberg’s writings. Asshole? Same thing; you might take them for granted, but I’m sure you’d miss it if you didn’t have one, which you can’t say for Goldberg’s attempts at humor. Maybe Jonah “Tits on a Bull” Goldberg? Hmmm. For that matter, I should probably revise my title; I think I’m libeling Simpson…

…in fairness, Cornerites are willing to show some compassion: on behalf of the lost home of Jefferson Davis. Yeah, the lost home of somebody who led a movement to commit treason on behalf of slavery is the real tragedy here.

One of the biggest reasons that the arguments of American “pro-lifers” are such a self-contradictory shambles is the belief of many of them that women should not be subject to any legal sanctions, although if you believe the underlying premises of those who would criminalize abortion this woman is guilty of taking a human life. Obviously, this doesn’t make a shred of sense, and provides clear evidence they really don’t take their own arguments seriously. Dawn Eden–who is willing, horribly but at least consistently, to apply pro-life logic to cases of rape–tries to defend the indefensible in comments:

A woman who has an abortion may not be aware of what she is doing. But the abortionists are, and they’re the ones who should be prosecuted.

This is, of course, an exceptionally bad (and pernicious) argument. The question of whether the fetus is a human life with legal status is a moral and ethical question, not an empirical question. A doctor performing an abortion, of course, has no more access to this moral question than a woman seeking an abortion. Eden’s argument–like the original late 19th century laws that originally banned abortion–is premised on the idea that women are not really moral agents. Eden wants to take us back to a time in which women were not full citizens (or, in some cases, even legal persons) but rather where wards of the state and/or their husbands. It’s framed in the language of compassion, but this is a debased, patriarchal form of “compassion,” premised on the idea that women are not full members of society who share the rights and responsibilities of adult citizens. Given how widespread Eden’s argument is among pro-lifers–up to and including the Republican platform–I think it’s pretty instructive about how the pro-life movement views women.

There is some confusion in the blogosphere and in the general media about what precisely an oil spot strategy consists of. In particular, some people are arguing that the “oil spot” strategy argued for by Andrew Krepinevich is essentially the same as the “strategic hamlet” strategy tried by the United States and South Vietnam in the early 1960s. This is not the case.

The strategic hamlet program came well before the height of US involvement in South Vietnam. The idea was to protect South Vietnamese farmers from Viet Cong insurgents by collecting them in specific areas and fortifying those villages. The program was extremely disruptive to rural life in South Vietnam, as it uprooted families from their ancestral lands and forced them to live in new areas, often where land was scarce. Also, many of the “strategic” hamlets never received the funds and weapons that they were supposed to get. In any case, the South Vietnamese Army lacked the capacity to defend the hamlets from insurgents. The program was a disastrous failure.

The oil spot strategy is different, and was tried for a short while by the Marines in the mid-1960s. The motivation of an oil spot strategy is similar to that of a strategic hamlet; locals who believe they can be protected from insurgents will be less likely to support those insurgents. Instead of uprooting families and packing them into villages, however, the Marines took over the defense of an area and patrolled it regularly. The focus was not on hunting insurgents in the jungle, but rather on preventing insurgents from attacking villages and collecting taxes, weapons, and food. As people grew to fear insurgent attacks less, they would grow more cooperative with the Marines. Villagers would begin to plan for the future, the economy would improve, and the insurgents would suffer.

On a small scale these tactics worked in Vietnam, before Westmoreland shut the operation down. They probably couldn’t have won the war even if tried on a large scale, and I doubt very much that they can defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Nevertheless, it’s important to keep our terms clear.

I suppose it’s not as consequential as the horribly botched coverage of Intelligent(sic) Design, but this Times article about snake-oil salesman Kevin Trudeau suffers from similar pathologies. As with the ID articles, if you read far enough into the article you’ll find out that he’s a felonious con man selling crackpot “cures” for cancer and other illnesses, and also pitching a subscription-fee website. But the article suggests that there’s some legitimate disagreement about whether there are many flat-out cures for cancer being suppressed by the Medical Establishment. Really, if you can’t do it right it would be better to just ignore him.

I’m reminded of the fact that both the leading English-language newspaper and leading English language television station used to give column space and free time to JoJo Savard, a Quebecois Miss Cleo. Now, perhaps because of public opinion it’s too much to ask newspapers to print stories pointing out that astrology is a massive fraud. But it’s certainly not too much to ask for them not to promote it. This isn’t just a harmless waste of time; we’re talking about a lot of people, many of them desperate, suffering from serious emotional problems and with little money, running up huge credit card bills to get worthless advice from a con artist who allegedly trustworthy media sources are actually treating seriously. (And, of course, in some cases it’s more about marketing; I doubt that many women would cancel subscriptions if newspapers had noted during the Dove controversy that butt cream doesn’t actually work, but cosmetic advertisers might be upset.) To the extent that various media organs are covering the Kevin Trudeaus and JoJo Savards (and Discovery Institutes) of the world, they should actually tell their readers the facts, and they should certainly not treat them a serious figures.

It doesn’t get much worse than Mike Hargrove bringing in the occasionally-pitching-like-stylings of Matt Thornton to face Jason Giambi, who in one of the most foreseeable acts in baseball history immediately crushed a 3-run homer.

Even worse, after that Hargrove stormed out of the dugout and started screaming at Thornton. The thing is, Grover, Matt Thornton can’t fucking pitch. Screaming at him for giving up a homerun is like screaming at the Mojave Desert for being dry. It’s your fault for bringing him into a game situation just because he throws with his left hand.

…but, come hell or high water you know the Seattle media will keep holding the team accountable–by writing Peggy Noonanesque peans to Hustling White Guy (TM) Wee Wllie Bloomquist. Sure, he can’t field much or hit at all, but he has the heart of a lion! The guts of Orson Welles! The makeup of Randy Myers! The mascara of Jeff Reardon!

Roxanne thinks that the top 100 songs of her graduation year were less than impressive. Perhaps, but it could be a lot worse. Take my grad year, the Nirvana-1 1990, which sucked so much ass you’d be begging your captor for a small dose of 1981 to break the pain. Starting with #1, the unlistenable songs are legion, without a lot of good points, and is even worse than I feared (Glen Medeiros was still releasing songs in 1990?). “Thieves in the Temple” is great, and Sinead doing Prince is soild enough. The second iteration of the B-52s is lesser, but in this context they’re a godsend; “Roam” is an excellent Song About Fucking (ditto “The Humpty Dance”) and “Love Shack” has saved more than one wedding reception dance for me. But still, what a gruesome year–it brings back bad memories of the guy in my dorm who would turn up the radio full blast whenever “Unskinny Bop” would come on, and even that is preferable to the 70 Phil Collins song on my list. And Jive Bunny cancels out at least three good songs. And it would be even worse if I recognized everyone–who the hell was Linear or Mellow Man Ace? Anyway, I’ll use the same denotations as Roxanne except I’ll italicize the truly appalling songs: